Tap AppleEvents being sent to another application

Question

Is it possible to monitor or tap the stream of Apple Events being sent to a process, in the same way you can tap Quartz Events?

I have an application that talks to another application to force it to import files, but it does so in a way that's unavailable through menus or UI scripting, and I'm trying to track down how it does this.

Answer 1

Do you need to do this programmatically or is manual/interactive OK? If manual is OK, here are some approaches:

Try using AppleScript Editor to record the target app.

Try using the techniques listed in Technical Note TN2124: Mac OS X Debugging Magic under Apple Events. For example, set the environment variable AEDebugReceives to 1 and run the target app under that environment.

Answer 2

there is no such tap for ae events AFAIK I am happy to be proven wrong

there are NSDistributed notifications which you can tap!